Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Republican Debate
Ambush: 1400 HoursGiuliani, McCain, and company know
what they have to do to Huckabee.

SINCE
YOU DIDN'T LISTEN... It's the Championship Round in Iowa. Like
Billy Conn against Joe
Louis, Mike Huckabee has outpointed the favorite(s) by dancing nimbly
around the ring and somehow escaping any serious punishment, making his
opposition look flatfooted
by comparison:

Brimming with confidence, the suddenly
laughing challenger moved in on Louis, telling him as he pulled the
champion into a clinch, "You've got a fight on your hands, Joe." And
Joe knew it as Conn punctuated his remark by banging both hands to the
head, following up with a left to Louis' face and a right that landed
squarely on Louis' jaw, which hung open in amazement and pain.
Shuffling forward, a newly-frustrated Louis resorted to pushing Conn
into the ropes and throwing one right as the quicker challenger
retaliated with a right and a left to the head and a right to the body.
Suddenly the fight was all Conn.

But this late in the fight, it's the time for sluggers, the time when
the ones who are truly tough start stalking their victim across the
ring in single-minded pursuit of a knockout. Giuliani and McCain in
particular know what it is to be in a lowdown brawl, and they'll be
going after Huckabee with all the lead pipes and baseball bats in their
arsenal.

But Huckabee has a different agenda. He can just duck the pipes and
bats as long as he's brought the right weapons for the one opponent he
really has to bring down.

So what's going to happen? Take a look at what transpires starting at two
minutes into this clip.

Not a prediction. Just an intimation.

UPDATE
FOLLOWING THE DEBATE. Wow. We were utterly and completely wrong.
And, boy, are we disappointed. What a bunch of castrati. With the
exception of Thompson (one time), Tancredo, and Keyes who resisted or ignored the Nurse Ratchet moderator. That's
what really concerned us. These are the only ones -- let's face it, the
doomed losers -- who seemed to make any sense. We also watched the Luntz dynamic audience
response graphics Fox showed for each candidate as questions were
responded to. In Iowa, at least, there are no more Republicans. Every
time a response suggested that the federal government doesn't know best
or shouldn't intervene, the ratings dipped into the throwaway zone. (Especially poor Alan.
He's the only traditional old-school Republican in the bunch. Which
makes him an angry pariah descending into the hell of moderate contempt.) McCain passed up his one opportunity to mend fences with legiimate
conservatives by failing to cite his obnoxious support for amnesty as a
mistake he would undo if given a second chance. He's an arrogant jerk.
Romney's so smoothly and evenly above it all that we're beginning to
wonder if he has any emotions at all; in fact, it seems possible he's a
sociopath. Is he a serial killer, too? Truthfully, it wouldn't surprise
us. Huckabee is absolutely the dumb yokel the Republican establishment
fears he is, but none of the leading candidates showed the guts to
confront him or make the obvious points. Ron Paul should be locked up.
He's a monomaniac.

The only standout was the Des Moines Register moderator. She
single-handedly transformed the whole debate into an episode of the
Weakest Link.

[Uh, for those who didn't see the actual debate, the part of Mike Huckabee was played by 'Lorraine.'] Unless it was more like this.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party is doomed in the short term.
Which makes us right after
all. Because this
would be infinitely better
than what we've got -- namely, no
candidates who are up to
leading the most powerful nation in the world if it means standing up
to an officious bitch when voters might be watching.

Ugh.

Dean
Barnett? Hugh Hewitt?
Don't you dare spin this as a win for Mitt
Romney. Here's
who he is. Is that what you really want? Well, most of
us don't. And we're not that
much dumber than you.

posted at
5:20 pm
by
The Glimmers

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Crashing the Global
Warming Jet Set

MODERATE
INSANITY. A contingent of actual scientists disrupted the
festivities in Bali by crashing the international Global Warming shindig
being hosted there by the U.N. While bouncers fumed and grant-whores
huffed in outrage (emitting more tons of dangerous carbon exhaust), a
variety of skeptics proved
beyond doubt that the vaunted 'consensus' on Global Warming does
not exist because skeptical scientists do exist.

Skeptical Scientists Urge
World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

BALI, Indonesia - An international team of scientists skeptical of
man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al
Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the
courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands.

"Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is
to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants.

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and
we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added. (LINK)

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the
group of skeptical scientists.

"UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I
should not come to this conference. They have also made several
attempts to interfere with our public meetings," Monckton explained.

"It is a circus here," agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans.
Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists
at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that
refute the UN's climate claims.

"This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only
a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences," Evans
said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort.

But nobody was listening. Most of the attendees were relaxing by the
pool...

Or grabbing a quick bite to eat at the
snack bar...

Or a cooling beverage in the faculty lounge...

Unless they were otherwise engaged...

In their hotel rooms...

Working up an appetite for the pig roast keynote
address later on.

Keynote
Speaker Albert Gore, Nobel Porker
Prize Winner

Saving the world is a tough job. But somebody's got to do it. Thank God
for the U.N. And us*.

UPDATE.
Something reassuring. Why the Global Warming alarmists aren't really
going to be able to ram their Luddite agenda down the world's throat
and put a halt to progress. Because progress is just so damn cool.

Consider it the stealth fighter against environmental wacko-ism.

Feel better? Yeah, so do we.

posted at
1:24 pm
by
LocoPunk

Monday, December 10, 2007

Please...Imagine Smell-O-Vision.

A HUGE MESS.I just
had the uneasiest feeling about this post. I think it may wind up
costing me my life to speak in greater depth about this photograph than
IP did here.
But I will anyway.

I was in college at the same time as these people -- and thousands of
their friends. Here's
what Bill has to say about that time now:

The former president opened a two-day
swing through Iowa on behalf of his wife, packing nearly 500 people
into a theater on the campus of Iowa State University.

"She has spent a lifetime as a change agent when she had the option to
do other things," he said.

"I thought she was the most gifted person of our generation," said
Clinton, who said he told her, "You know, you really should dump me and
go back home to Chicago or go to New York and take one of those offers
you've got and run for office."

Yecch. Ye-e-e-e-ch.

You can't know. If you're not between 55 and 60, you'll never know.
These people were the scum of the earth, and they ruined a lot of
lives. Even Dr.
Sanity doesn't know what narcisssism is if she didn't witness the
tantrum that occurred on Ivy league campuses during the radical years.
The militant anti-war movement was a Marxist and thoroughly
male-chauvinist offensive. The modern feminist movement was born out of
the atrocious way male radicals treated female hangers-on in this
timeframe. Women were there to provide sex to the political leaders of
the movement. Period. As a sexual gambit it worked because the women
who allied themselves with the radical anti-war movement were not
attaractive. They didn't try to be. They didn't even bathe. But neither
did the men.

Try to imagine the smell of the photograph above. You can't. Crisp
snowy air is a mitigating factor. Imagine the dorm room they came from.
I'm a veteran of that age. Sandalwood incense intended to cover the
reek of marijuana, but failing at that and utterly powerless to mask
the stench of unwashed clothes, the grime of hippie lassitude, the body
odor of the politically indigent.

I'm sitting here aghast. Is it really possible that the United States
of America will elect this totally unqualified -- except by marriage --
radical concubine as the President of the United States?

And just how fooled are you by the protestations of a two-term hippie
President who always said whatever he thought people wanted to hear and
who now says that he always believed his thick-ankled wife was the
leader we all want and need?

LOOK AT THE GODDAM PICTURE. They both
agitated against the interests of the United States. They both sympathized with the communist
government of North Vietnam. And there's very little reason to think
either of them have reformed their views in any material way. Bill
despised the military and the CIA while terrorists attacked the World
Trade Center with NO U.S. response. Hillary -- a Bernardine
Dohrn who got away with it -- asks us to trust her because she can
castrate a general in her sleep. Is this the United States of America?
or a sick inside-out version of the Wizard of Oz?

Half the United States knows voting for Hillary is a return to the
radical 60s. That's why half the Democrats are willing to consider a
totally unqualified half-term senator from Illinois as a superior
alternative.

How do you render a scream of anguish in print? Exclamation points?
Okay. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE 12/14/07:
Some evidence to back up my gut convictions. At American Digest. Here's just a
sample:

I was in Berkeley in that summer of
1971. I was living about four blocks away from where Bill and Hillary
were, in the parlance of the time, "shacked up." These were my
not-so-mean streets. I know what went down. And I am here to tell you
that there was no such thing as an unstoned student activist/hippy
living in that neighborhood at that time. It was non-stop sex, drugs,
rock and roll, and activism. I know. I was there. And while I don't
remember everything, I remember a lot. More than I should given the
quantity, quality, and diversity of the drugs that were on the scene,
on the street, and in the bodies of all of us at the time in that
place....

By 1971 I'd been around Berkeley and the Bay Area for some time. And I
was there, living in a house on corner of Fulton and Ward streets not
more than four blocks from the Derby Street apartment. If the Clintons
ventured outside onto Telegraph Avenue at all we would have passed each
other on the street, skulked around Cody's books, and had cappuccino at
the Med. On this you can bet your stash of primo Afghan hash.

The other thing you can bet the stash on about the Clintons in that
summer of 1971 in Berkeley is that they were stoned, loaded, blasted, wasted, high as a
kite, and just plain baked.
At the very least. Assuming that pot and hashish was as far as it went.
And it did not for many in that summer, I assure you, stop at that.
Other drugs that were around for the asking and used frequently were
LSD and cocaine. Heroin too...

Read as much as your stomach will tolerate. If you're like me, that
will probably end with a nauseated bump at his description of Bill and
Hillary "balling" to the Doors after a meal of "palatable chicken
curry."

Nothing worse than throwing up... Anyone have a breath mint?

Worst thing about this site? Always being right.

posted at
4:49 pm
by
TruePunk

Saturday, December 08, 2007

. The existence or nonexistence of God is a big
question. It amuses me that young leftists have succeeded in asserting
their atheism so often that they've put theists on the defensive. Flush
with their rhetorical triumph, they're amazingly arrogant about
proclaiming that they're infinitely smarter than the fools who continue
to believe in God.

Apologists for God have been caught off guard. I, personally, was
stupefied when a longtime Roman Catholic friend I asked to cite the
best argument he knew of against atheism recommended a book by the
Anglican C. S. Lewis.

Sound dire? It isn't. The Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of
the world -- and all their dumb disciples -- can't talk their way
around the fact that common sense is on the side of the existence of a
"higher power" of some kind, meaning a power possessed of far more
intelligence than Dawkins or Hitchens can lay claim to. The stridency
of their objections is a lot like that of the solid citizen who shakes
his fist at the lightning storm daring it to strike him.

Fools. Atheism isn't the
intelligent default position. It's simply the "Get out of Jail Free"
card for a bunch of folks who equate a lack of knowledge with
certainty. Atheists put their faith in the mathematics of the universe,
the ellipses of the orbits, the explosive temperatures of gases, the
mutations of organic molecules. But why do the laws of math or biology
obtain in the first place? They don't know, and they don't care. They
don't know where the universe came from, they don't know how life
began, and they can't explain how man erupted from primate mediocrity
in less than 50,000 years to produce Leonardo and Michelangelo. All
they're certain of is that God had nothing to do with it.

Fine. Except that all self-professed atheists are lying. Nobody can be sure there's no
higher power -- you know, the one who dreamed up mathematics and
physics and chemistry and biology... The atheists are all agnostics unless they're utter
imbeciles. What they're saying is that they don't know where we come
from bu they're pretty sure all the religions are wrong. They
think they know Yahweh never rescued the Jews from annihilation, Christ
didn't die for mankind on the cross, and Buddha didn't ascend into
heaven after telling his followers how to live their lives. All such
notions of divinity are wrong and stupid. But such nonbeliefs are a far
cry from asserting anything as positively true about the universe we
live in.

That would be fine but for a few things. Atheism is not a religion.
It's not a philosophy. It's an abnegation. There's nothing about it
that's a moral system. Once I agree with you that the universe exists
without a creator, we're all free to interpret our existence as
we like. No God, okay. No spiritual life that isn't a function of
chemistry, great. If we drink some wine and agree in our cups that
there just might be some grand architect of existence who wrote all the
laws of our beloved science, that still doesn't mean there's any
implicit morality in his scheme. Right? But specification of the
creator scientist who doesn't care who we fuck or kill or dismember is
an assumed human limitation of a power we can't possibly know is
limited to some cosmological laboratory. When a scientist concedes that
God might exist as a soulless didact of mathematics he is seeking to
constrain that higher power to dimensions he can comprehend. His
sterile conclusions say nothing about whether it's good or bad for
people to steal, commit adultery, engage in incest, or slaughter anyone
who obstructs his wishes. On what basis does any atheist proclaim any
of these activities unacceptable? Why shouldn't they all be acceptable? Unless there's
some spurious, and entirely unenforceable, philosophy which says such
things are not to be done because... well, because.

Here's my take. Math is more
than accident. God is more than a gifted geek. The planets do spin
round, the stars do shine, and we are really here, some of us smarter
than chimpanzees. An accident? Perhaps.

But perhaps not, too. A conscious species looks to the heavens and
seems to find an answer. Do the scientists and atheists ask why there are so many more of us
human beings than there are gorillas, chimps, rhinos, bears, leopards,
elephants, and giraffes? No. They automatically assume our
preponderance is a kind of guilt. It never occurs to them there might
be a kind of meaning in the fact that a conscious species which has
gone out of its way to believe in something beyond its own existence --
to the point of being willing to sacrifice itself individually for a
nonexistent deity -- has a vastly superior chance of survival.

If some one wrote the laws of math and physics and biology, it
doesn't mean he's just a scientist. It means he's so far above us we
can't assume he's also not personally involved in all our daily lives.
It also means he might interact with us at the level of art
literature, music, and, yes, religion.

What I've never gotten over is the endless symbolism of Christ's death
and resurrection. It goes out in all directions. Forever. Such a huge
story that it seems a divine event.

Hmmmm. Suggest anything to you?

How do you explain it? For
that matter, how do you explain anything that's happened to the race of
mankind?

Forget all that. Just tell me why it is exactly you act so fucking
superior to anyone who believes in God. Do that and I'll listen. I promise.

No, I don't. You're all a bunch of pseudo-intellectual fakes. If we
debated face to face, I'd crush you. With pleasure. Don't ever doubt it.

UPDATE.
Interesting comments. I'll respond to a few points here. First, I was
principally disappointed in the C.S. Lewis reference not because he was
an Anglican but because he is yesterday's news in the context of the
current war on religion being waged by atheists. Lewis argued the
question principally as a philosopher and lived before a lot of the
science which could and probably should be marshalled in support of
those who believe in God even existed. Lewis is an eloquent advocate
for people who have wrestled with questions of faith in the context of
faith, but he's beside the point for today's default secularists, who
are ignorant of both the history of theology and the history of its
impacts on the development of civilization. His is simply not the
argument that's required to puncture the arrogance of the self-ordained
demigods of science and its herd of incurious followers.

Edward's comments are the providence I was hoping for. He is polite,
articulate, and a perfect example of the fallacious reasoning I
described in the post. Like most atheists, he hasn't inquired deeply
enough into the matter to realize that he is looking at a two-part
question. He therefore believes his position is easily justified by
what he mistakes for an absence of evidence.

He believes, as I indicated in my post, that the argument against God
is synonymous with the argument against the God of the Old and New
Testaments, the Allah of Islam, the pantheon of Hinduism, the implicit
divinity of Buddha, etc. He correctly states that there is no
scientific or rational proof of these religious interpretations and
concludes that his atheism is defensible against all comers with no
need even to break a sweat. Problem is, that's only part two of the
question.

Part One is the universe we live in. What does that tell us about
whether or not there is a -- for want of a better word -- divine intelligence at work? It's
an unpardonable omission, really, given that the war against God is
being led by scientists (and the scientifically disposed) whose case
depends on ignoring the macro view in favor of micro models. Since
Dawkins believes he can explain the evolution of life from one-celled
organisms to mankind by exclusively chemical and biological processes
which function without intelligence and largely via accidental
circumstances, he also believes he has eliminated higher intelligence
from the workings of the entire universe. From here it's a short step
to proclaiming that if the twelve plagues of Egypt have similarly
mundane scientific explanations, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition
is delusion.

This is, to put it mildly, an example of drawing the question too
narrowly. Historically, the mission of science was to explain the
natural world and its workings, including cosmology, not to amass
legalistic arguments against the likelihood of divine intervention in
those workings. How can we be sure the question is too narrowly drawn?
Because every religion in the world could be utter bunk, and it could
still be the case that the universe -- i.e., the natural, physical
state of the existence we experience -- is the creation of a
supernatural intelligence, meaning an intelligence that is literally
above and beyond the natural. That's a concept normally referred to by
the word 'God.'

For atheists to be truly atheists and not agnostics, they must
believe that there is not and never was a supernatural agent who
created the existence we all experience. And it is here that they are
required to confront voluminous evidence which can only be explained away
by acts of faith that make the irrational beliefs of Christians look
puny by comparison. Their own rules of science are against them.

Consider this paradox. The more Dawkins can make evolution seem like a
rational, predictable series of responses to random changes in the
environment, the more he makes the process of evolution resemble a
computer program. The more he excludes intelligent intervention from
that process, the more programmatic he makes it. Because algorithms,
and complex alogorithms at that, are clearly at work. According to
evolutionary models, eyes have evolved separately and independently in
multiple branches of the animal family tree. Why? And how? Eyes are
distinguished by the fact that none of their properties offers any
survival value at all until their myriad components come together and
produce the ability to see. The evolutionary program may be running
automatically and without intervention, but it has to include an
algorithm for making eyes. So there's a computer and a program, but no
programmer.

Consider another paradox. In the Dawkins model, human beings are
intelligent but the universe itself is not. The universe is just a
series of meaningless chemical reactions that nevetheless obey physical
and mathematical constraints even the most determined atheists are
compelled to describe as laws. These are laws which human intelligence
has struggled, and still struggles, to understand, with only partial
success. Dawkins and his brethren have spent their lives endeavoring to
understand these laws and yet, with a straight face, they declare that
there is no absolutely no evidence of a supreme intelligence operating
behind or prior to the phenomena of nature. As if the mere fact of
conscious human intelligence doesn't indicate that such intelligence
has a precedent in the universe itself or is any kind of pale
reflection of a built-in property of that universe. Got it.

I could go on citing paradoxes but I won't. The bottom line is simple.
We live in a house whose architecture, plumbing, and electrical systems
we know to be operating in complex, dynamic ways through time and we're
studying their operation like crazy, but we're certain there's no
evidence anyone built the house in the first place. That's what it means
when Edward says he sees "no evidence" for the existence of God.

The second part of the question really does become a matter of
philosophy and faith, but if one has properly considered the first
part, the second is no longer purely academic or purely foolish. If the
house we live in had an architect or an engineer, we really have no
basis for presuming that his intelligence would be unaware of or
uninterested in ours. If he were there, we certainly couldn't be sure
that he is NOT above nature or that his engineering is not so beyond
comprehension that it could seem to be operating without intervention
even though its author is intimately involved in every aspect of its,
and our, phenomenology. There is no value system we could confidently
impute to such an intelligence that would guarantee the sheer size of
the house (i.e., universe) would make our existence in it seem too
negligible to pay attention to. In fact, the evidence of nature is
quite contrary to this kind of size-based snobbery. Wouldn't a generic
lab-rat god be content with identical snowflakes? And why would the
laws of his mathematics extend into areas that have no physical
analogues at all, featuring properties that appear to have no
conceivable purpose but the excitation of intelligent imagination?

But I'm sure Edward can explain all this away. As easily as he
dismisses the countless manifestations of human faith which have
resulted in his own freedom to regard the contemplation of life itself
as a "waste of time."

posted at
1:27 pm
by
InstaPunk

Friday, December 07, 2007

.
I have to admit it's hard to imagine that a nation with as short an
attention span as the U.S. -- and with as much disdain for the outdated
relicts of yesteryear -- could summon any real enthusiasm for a royal
Restoration such as the Clintons have in mind. Everything about them is
old, even their scandals, which are already distressingly reminiscent
of the '90s rather than the exciting new era of the Global War on
Terror and the Congressional War on the Iraq War.

I mean, do Americans really want to go back to sex scandals (Lewinsky,
Willey, Jones, Huma...) and campaign finance scandals (Charlie Trie,
Norman Hsu...) and personal corruption scandals (Whitewater, Marc Rich,
Hillary's private jets...) in an age when lowly U.S. Senators are
coming across with bathroom stall scandals and the young lions of the
Democrat Party believe they can prove the President and his VP not only
stole two elections in a row but also planned the worst terrorist
attack in U.S. history? In this context, the standard Clinton fireworks
are pretty small potatoes if you ask me. [YAWN]. Excuse me. Didn't mean
to be disrespectful there, but facts are facts.

Who needs Lewinsky's soggy blue dress when we've got Paris Hilton,
Lindsey Lohan, and Britney Spears showing off their private parts in
high resolution to paparazzi with guaranteed 4-hour turnaround on the
Internet? And free sex tapes filmed in state-of-the-art military
nightvision. Even Bill's geriatric sins are mild compared to all that.

And just who is it that's so fond of the 1990s anyway? In case you've
forgotten, here's what the American scene was really like when the
Clintons burst into our lives a whole generation ago:

Boy, that was a long time ago. A LOT of water over the dam since then.
And this woman dares to talk about the future as if her vision of it
were actually exciting? Give me a break. It's like Angela Lansbury
promo'ing a super-hot episode of "Murder She Wrote" on the Merv Griffin Show

If single mothers are her biggest constituency, I'm pretty disappointed
in single mothers. I'd sort of gotten the idea they were taking their
cues from Britney, not Doctor Ruth.